Boycott Divestment Sanctions Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 - WHY NOW?

  Chapter 2 - WHY BDS?

  Chapter 3 - THE SOUTH AFRICA STRATEGY FOR PALESTINE

  Chapter 4 - ACADEM IC BOYCOTT

  Chapter 5 - JUST INTELLECTUALS?

  Chapter 6 - FREEDOM VERSUS “ACADEMIC FREEDOM”

  Chapter 7 - REFLECTING ON THE CULTURAL BOYCOTT

  Chapter 8 - FIGHTING APARTHEID IN SOUTH AFRICA, CELEBRATING APARTHEID IN ISRAEL

  Chapter 9 - BETWEEN SOUTH AFRICA AND ISRAEL

  Chapter 10 - WHAT WE REALLY NEED!

  Chapter 11 - DERAILING INJUSTICE

  Chapter 12 - “BOYCOTTS WORK”

  Chapter 13 - BOYCOTTING ISRAELI SETTLEMENT PRODUCTS

  Chapter 14 - OUR SOUTH AFRICA MOMENT HAS ARRIVED

  Chapter 15 - AFTER THE FREEDOM FLOTILLA ATROCITY: BDS TAKES OFF

  Chapter 16 - LEADERSHIP, REFERENCE, AND THE ROLE OF ISRAELI ANTICOLONIALISTS

  CONCLUSION

  APPENDIX 1 - CALL FOR THE ACADEMIC AND CULTURAL BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL

  APPENDIX 2 - BDS CALL

  APPENDIX 3 - PACBI GUIDELINES FOR THE INTERNATIONAL ACADEMIC BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL

  APPENDIX 4 - PACBI GUIDELINES FOR THE INTERNATIONAL CULTURAL BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL

  NOTES

  Acknowledgements

  INDEX

  ABOUT HAYMARKET BOOKS

  ALSO FROM HAYMARKET BOOKS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  PRAISE FOR BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT, SANCTIONS

  “I have been to Palestine where I’ve witnessed the racially segregated housing and the humiliation of Palestinians at military roadblocks. I can’t help but remember the conditions we experienced in South Africa under apartheid. We could not have achieved our freedom without the help of people around the world using the nonviolent means of boycotts and divestment to compel governments and institutions to withdraw their support for the apartheid regime. Omar Barghouti’s lucid and morally compelling book is perfectly timed to make a major contribution to this urgently needed global campaign for justice, freedom, and peace.”

  —Archbishop Desmond Tutu

  “I commend this excellent book by Omar Barghouti.… It challenges the international community to support the BDS campaign until the entire Palestinian people can exercise their inalienable rights to freedom and self-determination and until Israel fully complies with its obligations under international law. BDS is a call to refuse to be silent in the face of military occupation of the Palestinian people by the Israeli regime, apartheid, and colonialism. BDS is a nonviolent way in which each of us and our governments can follow our conscience and rightful moral and legal responsibility and act now to save Palestinian lives by demanding that the Israeli apartheid regime give justice and equality to all.”

  —Mairead Maguire, 1976 Nobel Peace Laureate

  “This is a book about the political actions necessary to hinder and finally to stop the Israeli state machine that is operating every day to eliminate the Palestinian people. It is like an engineer’s report, not a sermon. Read it, decide, and then act.”

  —John Berger, author

  “When powerful governments will not act, ordinary people must take the lead…. Essential reading for all who care about justice and the plight of an oppressed people.”

  —Ken Loach, filmmaker

  “The ABC for internationalist support for Palestine is BDS. And the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against Israeli cruelty and injustice is gaining in significance and scope. Like the anti-apartheid movement against racist South Africa, BDS is helping to make a tremendous difference in what has been a most difficult struggle for human rights and the right of a colonized and dispossessed people to national self-determination. This inspiring book is a weapon in a noble struggle in which all right-thinking people can play a part.”

  —Ronnie Kasrils, author, activist, and

  former South African government minister

  “Once again Omar Barghouti delivers a conceptually lucid argument for the BDS movement that is difficult to refute. He offers a principled position accompanied by nuanced and thorough analyses, and though one may not agree with all of his claims, one is fully persuaded by the passionate clarity of his appeal. Barghouti reminds us what public responsibility entails, and we are lucky to have his relentless and intelligent analysis and argument. There is no more comprehensive and persuasive case than his for boycott, divestment, and sanctions to end the Israeli occupation and establish the ethical claim of Palestinian rights.”

  -Judith Butler, University of California at Berkeley

  “Barghouti explains with lucidity, passion, and unrivaled intelligence... that bringing an end to apartheid in Palestine and seeing justice and equality for all the people who live there is not a distant dream but a reality we can bring about in the next few years using BDS.”

  —Ali Abunimah, author of One Country and cofounder of Electronic Intifada

  “Barghouti is the future. He is intelligent, empowered, and nonviolent. He is completely impressive. It would help Americans to see such a picture of Palestinian political engagement when they have such a distorted image of who Palestinians are. Some day they will know him.”

  —Phillip Weiss, cofounder of Mondoweiss:

  The War of Ideas in the Middle East

  INTRODUCTION

  Besiege your siege ... there is no other way.

  —Mahmoud Darwish

  Since it is in a concrete situation that the oppressor-oppressed contradiction is established, the resolution of this contradiction must be objectively verifiable. Hence, the radical requirement—both for the individual who discovers himself or herself to be an oppressor and for the oppressed—that the concrete situation which begets oppression must be transformed.1

  —Paulo Freire

  First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

  —Mahatma Gandhi

  Almost every day, the pale, slender woman complains to the ruthless, self-righteous ruffian about the miserable little shack she is confined to, not to mention the daily abuse she has to put up with. Sick of her endless whining, one day he brings in a goat to stay with them. Her complaints turn into desperate sobbing, quite expectedly, so he punches her until she bleeds. She cries in silence, mourning for the day when she had more space, without the goat crowding the miserable shack.

  After weeks of her begging, he gets rid of the goat. Now she feels she has her space again. Everything is finally back to normal—just the usual dose of abuse and exploitation. For a day she is content with her accomplishment, but the next morning she wakes up with an eruption of long-suppressed memories, erasing her forgetfulness and disturbing her “peace.” She remembers when he first abducted her and forced her into slavery. She realizes how she has rationalized and internalized the battering as part of surviving, as the lesser evil. She could no longer care less about an extra few square feet here or there. She wants to feel whole again, and nothing less than her freedom—unmitigated, unconditional—would do. So she sets out to resist and calls out for support.2

  For more than six decades Israel has enjoyed the best of both worlds, a free hand to implement its extremist colonial agenda of ethnically cleansing as many indigenous Palestinians from their homeland and grabbing as much of their land as possible and, simultaneously, a deceptive, mythical reputation for democracy and enlightenment. It has effectively succeeded in cynically exploiting the Nazi genocide of European Jewish communities, transforming the pain and guilt felt across the West into an almost invincible shield from censure and accountability. As
Archbishop Desmond Tutu said: “I think the West, quite rightly, is feeling contrite, penitent, for its awful connivance with the Holocaust. The penance is being paid by the Palestinians. I just hope again that ordinary citizens in the West will wake up and say ‘we refuse to be part of this.’ ”3

  The collapse of the Soviet Union, the emergence of the United States as the sole superpower, and the ascension in Washington of a militarist neoconservative self-described “cabal” with uniquely strong ties to Israel4—and to warmongering Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu in particular—all allowed Israel to maximize its gains and influence over decision-making processes in the United States.5 Israel’s power in the US Congress had been established for quite some time;6 during the George W. Bush era the White House was subject to many of the same influences. The criminal attacks of September 11, 2001, created what Netanyahu saw as a golden opportunity to further consolidate Israel’s already great influence over policy setting in Washington.7 And starting a decade earlier, the sham “peace process” launched by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Oslo in 1993 had rehabilitated Israel’s diplomatic and, crucially, economic ties with dozens of countries across the world,8 opening up badly needed markets for the state’s expanding industrial, particularly military manufacturing, prowess.

  Ironically, at the peak of its military, nuclear, economic, and political power, Israel started becoming more vulnerable.

  The fact that the United States got mired in a seemingly indefinite “war on terror” (which should aptly be called “the mother of all terror,” as it is the most egregious and immoral form of state terror, shedding any veneer of respect for international law, and simultaneously a cause of much terror by fanatic groups in many countries), causing death and destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan of genocidal proportions 9 and a significant loss of US soldiers’ lives, has started to open some cracks in the otherwise iron wall of support for Israel in the US establishment. The 2008 defeat and democratic purge of the neocons helped widen those cracks.

  John Mearsheimer, expert on the Israel lobby in the United States, describes the process of change, which has accelerated recently:The combination of Israel’s strategic incompetence and its gradual transformation into an apartheid state creates significant problems for the United States. There is growing recognition in both countries that their interests are diverging; indeed this perspective is even garnering attention inside the American Jewish community. Jewish Week, for example, recently published an article entitled “The Gaza Blockade: What Do You Do When U.S. and Israeli Interests Aren’t in Synch?” Leaders in both countries are now saying that Israeli policy toward the Palestinians is undermining U.S. security. Vice President Biden and Gen. David Petraeus, the head of Central Command, both made this point recently, and the head of the Mossad, Meir Dagan, told the Knesset [Israel’s parliament] in June, “Israel is gradually turning from an asset to the United States to a burden.”

  For decades, Israel’s supporters have striven to shape public discourse in the United States so that most Americans believe the two countries’ interests are identical. That situation is changing, however. Not only is there now open talk about clashing interests, but knowledgeable people are openly asking whether Israel’s actions are detrimental to U.S. security.10

  This context of relative change in the US establishment, accompanied by more radical change at the grassroots level in the United States and Europe in reaction to Israel’s war crimes and other grave violations of international law in its bloody suppression of the second Palestinian intifada, provided fertile ground for a well-conceived, nonviolent citizens’ movement for Palestinian rights to flourish.

  On July 9, 2005, Palestinian civil society launched what is now widely recognized as a qualitatively different phase in the global struggle for Palestinian freedom, justice, and self-determination against a ruthless, powerful system of oppression that enjoys impunity and that is intent on making a self-fulfilling prophecy of the utterly racist, myth-laden foundational Zionist dictum of “a land without a people for a people without a land.” In a historic moment of collective consciousness, and informed by almost a century of struggle against Zionist settler colonialism, the overwhelming majority in Palestinian civil society issued the Call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it fully complies with its obligations under international law.11 More than 170 Palestinian civil society groups, including all major political parties, refugee rights associations, trade union federations, women’s unions, NGO networks, and virtually the entire spectrum of grassroots organizations, recalled how people of conscience in the international community have “historically shouldered the moral responsibility to fight injustice, as exemplified in the struggle to abolish apartheid in South Africa,” calling upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to “impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era.”

  Since 2008, the BDS movement has been led by the largest coalition of Palestinian civil society organizations inside historic Palestine and in exile, the BDS National Committee (BNC).12

  Peace, Justice, and Rights

  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, one of Africa’s most important contemporary writers, wrote in the introduction to his Decolonising the Mind about how imperialism presents the struggling peoples of the earth with the “ultimatum” that they must “accept theft or death,” adding:The oppressed and the exploited of the earth maintain their defiance: liberty from theft. But the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against that collective defiance is the cultural bomb. The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. . . . It even plants serious doubts about the moral rightness of struggle. Possibilities of . . . victory are seen as remote, ridiculous dreams. The intended results are despair, despondency and a collective death-wish.13

  Ngugi goes on to suggest that the most appropriate response by those struggling for freedom and justice is “to confront this threat with the higher and more creative culture of resolute struggle.”

  The BDS campaign is among the most important forms of such “resolute struggle” by the great majority of Palestinians, who resist the colonization of their land and minds and demand nothing less than self-determination, freedom, justice, and unmitigated equality. The BDS Call, anchored in international law and universal principles of human rights, adopts a comprehensive rights-based approach, underlining the fact that for the Palestinian people to exercise its right to self-determination, Israel must end its three forms of injustice that infringe international law and Palestinian rights by:1. ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands [occupied in 1967] and dismantling the wall

  2. recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality

  3. respecting, protecting, and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties, as stipulated in UN Resolution 194

  As South African archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu once said: “I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.”14

  For decades, but especially since the Oslo accords signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1993, Israel, with varying degrees of collusion from successive US administrations, the European Union, and complacent Arab “leaders,” has attempted to redefine the Palestinian people to include only those who live in Palestinian territory occupied in 1967. The main objective has been to deceptively reduce the question of Palestine to a mere dispute over some “contested” territory occupied by Israel since 1967,
thus excluding the UN-sanctioned rights of the majority of the Palestinian people. In this context, peace devoid of justice becomes the objective, perpetuating injustice.15

  The so-called international community, under the hegemonic influence of the United States, the world’s only superpower, has not only failed to stop Israel’s construction of the wall and its settler colonies, both declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004; it has colluded in undermining hitherto UN-sanctioned Palestinian rights. This has prompted Palestinian society to again surpass its “leadership” and reassert its basic rights. The BDS Call, with unprecedented near-consensus support among Palestinians inside historic Palestine as well as in exile, reminded the world that the indigenous Palestinian people include the refugees forcibly displaced from their homeland—by Zionist militias and later the state of Israel—during the 1948 Nakba16 and ever since, as well as the Palestinian citizens of Israel who remained on their land and now live under a regime of legalized racial discrimination.17

  Ending the largely discernible aspects of the Israeli occupation while maintaining effective control over most of the Palestinian territory occupied in 1967 “in return” for Palestinians’ accepting Israel’s annexation of the largest colonial blocs, with the most fertile lands and richest water resources; relinquishing the right of return; and accepting Israel as an apartheid state—this has become the basic formula for the so-called peaceful settlement endorsed by the world’s hegemonic powers and acquiesced to by an unelected, unrepresentative, unprincipled, and visionless Palestinian “leadership.” The entire spectrum of Zionist parties in Israel and their supporters in the West, with a few exceptions, ostensibly accept this unjust and illegal formula as the “only offer” on the table before the Palestinians—or else the menacing Israeli bludgeon. With the sharp rise of the ultraright in Israel, even this long-held Israeli formula no longer enjoys majority support in the Israel public.18